Under the green old trees a mighty drama was unfolding, a Homeric song, the epic of a nation, as they piled up the bullet-proof cabins of Boonsboro. This rude fortification could not have withstood the smallest battery, but so long as the Indians had no cannon this wooden fort was as impregnable as the walls of a castle.
In a few weeks other forts, Harrodsburg and Logansport, dotted the canebrakes, and the startled buffalo stampeded for the salt licks.
In September Boone brought out his wife and daughters, the first white women that ever trod Kentucky soil.
"Ugh! ugh! ugh!"
A hundred Shawnees from their summer hunt in the southern hills came trailing home along the Warrior's Path, the Indian highway north and south, from Cumberland Gap to the Scioto.
"Ugh! ugh! ugh!"
They pause and point to the innumerable trackings of men and beasts into their beloved hunting grounds. Astonishment expands every feature. They creep along and trace the road. They see the settlements. It cannot be mistaken, the white man has invaded their sacred arcanum.
Amazement gives place to wrath. Every look, every gesture bespeaks the red man's resolve.
"We will defend our country to the last; we will give it up only with our lives."
Forthwith a runner flies over the hills to Johnson Hall on the Mohawk. Sir William is dead, dead endeavouring to unravel the perplexities of the Dunmore war, but his son, Sir Guy, meets the complaining Shawnees.
"The Cherokees sold Kentucky? That cannot be. Kentucky belongs to the King. My father bought it for him at Fort Stanwix, of the Iroquois. The Cherokees have no right to sell Kentucky. Go in and take the land." And so, around their campfires, and at the lake forts of the British, the Shawnee-Iroquois planned to recover Kentucky.
